They are fed grain because grain is cheap (through government subsidies) and it makes the cows fat quickly. Try it yourself - eat nothing but corn and soy for 6 months, they’ll bury you in a piano box.

Instead, cows should be allowed to forage for pasture. This keeps cows healthy and their milk clean. Too much grain in their diet causes an overly acidic condition, resulting in bloating and rampant mastitis. Pasteurization is pushed as a solution by the corporate food industry, but the two primary purposes for that is to 1) eliminate the costly expenses of maintaining a clean and healthy environment for the cows, dairy workers and, ultimately, consumers, and 2) to eliminate competition from small farmers and family farms who could sell directly to the public at farmers markets and roadside farm stands (remember those?). Instead, farmers are forced to sell to Big Dairy at a fraction of its value.

Not only does pasteurization destroy the delicate 3-dimensional proteins (making them unrecognizable to the body) and destroys the nutritional value of milk, but also ruptures the bodies of all the bacteria, releasing histamines into the milk. This is what causes most milk allergies - the histamines from 100’s of millions of ruptured bacteria bodies.

Did you know that the primary purpose of homogenization is to not only hide the fact that there is little cream in the pasteurized milk (and to hide disproportionate amounts of cream across the product line), but also to emulsify the grayish, dead bacterial “sludge” that would otherwise accumulate at the bottom? Sure, it’s dead - but I wouldn’t drink it.

If I had to distill all the reasons for avoiding pasteurized milk into just one fact, I like this one: if you feed a calf pasteurized milk, it will not live to maturity.

I second the top post (Karen) in suggesting realmilk.com for more information about raw milk and its demonization by Big Dairy, unfortunately supported by the conventional medical industry, government and other corporate sellouts. Money can’t buy love, but it sure buys everything else.

Brian X - please do some more reading, my friend, and adjust your food science blog as necessary. I visited your blog, enjoy it, but your comment above reveals that some remedial research is in order. I highly recommend “The Untold Story of Milk” by Ron Schmid, “The Raw Truth About Milk” by William Campbell Douglass, MD, “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon and Dr. Mary Enig, and “Real Food” by Nina Planck (a very good primer covering many exceptional books that deal with particular subjects in detail). If nothing else, an in-depth visit to http://www.westonaprice.org/ would be a good place to start.

Yours in Health,
Brian

What is Horizon’s relationship to Dean Foods and the Aurora factory farms, and how does this relate to its “beliefs and practices”?

More on Horizon factory farms:

http://www.cornucopia.org/horizon-factory-farm-photo-gallery/
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_400.cfm

Jacki

I work for Horizon and just want to clear something up quickly. We have absolutely no ties to H.P. Hood.

We also partner and support 485 family farmers across the nation. Please check out http://www.horizonorganicfacts.com for more info on our farming beliefs and practices.

From what I read, Hood advised the farmers that they would not renew their contracts when they expired (on Aug 1). So what’s the problem?! Hood is not obligated in any way to renew a contract. And the farmers claim that they were promised the moon is ridiculous also. If you were promised the moon, then shouldn’t that have been written into the contract? If it wasn’t, then obviously you were NOT promised the moon.

Seems to me that the call for a boycott is just an unfair tactic to try to force Hood to do business with them.

That said, Hood’s explanation for why they decided not to renew is also a mumbo jumbo of excuses which don’t make much sense to me. Anyways, mumbo jumbo or not, Hood still has the right to not renew, so I still have to side with Hood on this one. I will not support this boycott.

Raw milk is a dangerous product even if it comes from theoretically clean cows, and there are a lot of people pushing it out of willful ignorance or sheer blinkeredness, and I wouldn’t touch it unless it was turned into cheese (which generally overwhelms the pathogens).

But hey, what do I know? I just have a blog about food science.

http://www.cornucopia.org/dairysurvey/FarmID_94.html

http://www.cornucopia.org/dairysurvey/FarmID_105.html

Our Organic Valley milk in Colorado comes from local farms. See this article:

http://www.organicvalley.coop/our-story/meet-the-farmers/rocky-mountain/meet-the-mikitas/page-1/

However, I fully agree with boycotting Horizon Organic and the big box chains’ store brands.

Respectfully,

Tom